


Hand of Fate

by MelyndaR



Category: Scorpion (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 17:17:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12752703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelyndaR/pseuds/MelyndaR
Summary: In which Ralph discovers that Megan is a genius of sorts in her own right, and decides to do something to ensure that she can continue to do what she loves.





	Hand of Fate

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea if the in-canon Megan has any inclination such as what is outlined below, but I liked the idea so I went with it, and this story happened. Enjoy!

Ralph was always glad to get to the garage on any given day, and oftentimes he ran the short way between his mom’s car and the garage. Most of the time it took something impressive to slow him down.

In her own way, Megan O’Brien definitely counted as one of those impressive “things.”

In any case, she and Walter were making their way towards the garage at the same time as Ralph. Because he didn’t want to unsettle her balance on her crutches, he slowed to a walk. Ahead of him, Walter opened the door for his sister as Ralph flanked the opposite side of the doorway.

Megan smiled brightly at him in passing, saying jovially, “Greetings, my juvenile comrade!”

Ralph ticked an eyebrow upward. “Hi, Megan.”

She adjusted her center of gravity just enough to lean forward and ruffle his hair fondly before moving further into the garage and calling for Sly. Still puzzled by her strange – and literal – greeting, Ralph kept his gaze on Megan as his mom walked past him and Walter and into the building.

_Why had Megan spoken to him like that?_

Once he and Walter, too, were inside, he turned to the older genius and asked curiously, “Is Megan… okay?”

Walter nodded, adoration in his eyes and small smile as he tracked his sister’s movements before looking to Ralph. “Yes. I was simply teasing her. She was being articulate in an attempt to disprove my statement.”

“What did you say?”

Walter raised his voice a little, eyeing Megan teasingly again as he replied, “That as wonderful as my sister may be, she’s not exactly a genius.”

Megan, who was now leaning against Sly’s desk, chatting, turned back to her little brother and stuck her tongue out at him. Ralph looked away quickly, grinning even as he did his best to bite back a laugh. Walter caught his expression anyway, and the Irishman’s smile only widened before he headed to his own desk. Ralph thought through what Walter had said and done – how he had teased someone – as he found and turned on a tablet of his own.

Megan, he decided, was both interestingly normal and delightfully weird, and she had a way of… bringing out the – not the “normal” – the _humanity_ in a group of unusual geniuses.

_Almost like his own mom._

Yet something in Walter’s wording caught Ralph’s attention. _“not_ exactly _a genius…” Did that mean something in particular?_

Cradling his open tablet on his own arm, Ralph wandered over to Walter’s desk, deciding to ask. When he set down the device, Walter peered at him over the top of his computer as Ralph asked quietly, “Walter, is Megan smart?”

“Yes, of course,” Walter replied immediately. “I would never want anyone to think otherwise. I only meant that she doesn’t have an exceptional IQ.”

“So, she’s smart… but unexceptional,” Ralph theorized slowly, trying to puzzle out the woman.

“It’s not that, either; in fact, her art qualif—” Walter’s eyes suddenly grew very wide as he stammered, “I – I mean… she’s wonderful. Very exceptional in her own way.”

Ralph tilted his head to the side, studying Walter’s suddenly changed mannerisms and bearing. _He was nervous. Why? What had made Walter nervous?_

His mind snagging again on something Walter had said – on the words that even seemed to have caused the change in him – Ralph asked, “Her art? Megan is artistic? And what does it qualify as?”

Walter stared for a long moment – at Ralph, at his computer screen, and then at Ralph again. His lips were pressed into a thin line and his expression was solemn as he peered covertly around the garage. Ralph mirrored his action, and once they’d both ascertained that no one was watching them, Walter said softly, “Come with me.”

Without another word, Walter slipped up to his loft with Ralph at his heels. Ralph stopped just inside the doorway as Walter did the same in the middle of the room before taking a small collection of his mugs down from a kitchen cabinet. They were all colorful and appeared hand-painted, Ralph noted silently; at the same time Walter muttered, nearly to himself, “Megan painted these.”

“They’re pretty,” Ralph said quietly, made increasingly uncertain thanks to the jumpy look in Walter’s eyes and the fact that he didn’t know what his mentor wanted to hear.

Suddenly, Walter was smiling as he glanced back at Ralph, but his eyes seemed closer to… _sad_ as he replied, “They are, aren’t they? But, um, that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.  I, uh – I want to show you something else. But this – all of this – has to be our secret. Okay? I don’t know how Megan would feel about me telling you all of this.”

“Okay,” Ralph agreed solemnly. “I won’t tell anyone or anything.”

Walter nodded, then led the way to his bed. Already curious, Ralph became outright confused when Walter knelt by the bed, reaching underneath the bedframe… and pulling out an entirely different kind of frame. A white picture frame – surrounding a ten by eight charcoal drawing of two teenagers walking on the beach; they were viewed from behind, arms linked together as they walked.

“I don’t have a well-developed aesthetic sense,” Walter muttered thoughtfully. “But this is my favorite piece of artwork in the universe. Maybe I should hang it up somewhere – I can’t bear to get rid of it in any way, after all – but, again, I don’t know what Megan would think or say, or how I would explain it. And I, um,” he grimaced. “I don’t know if I can bear to see… how far her MS has progressed, to be reminded that she can no longer do this thing that she loves and is so amazing at.”

“The picture,” Ralph stared at it through narrowed eyes as understanding dawned. “It’s of you and Megan, isn’t it?”

Walter nodded, his smile definitely sad now. “She said she could never paint herself to her own satisfaction – at least not face-on – so this is… was her compromise.” He sighed as if he was bone-tired. “And now she can’t create artwork at all.”

Ralph’s eyes stayed narrowed, this time in thought, but he didn’t say anything, just watched Walter put the painting away and wipe at his glassy eyes. “I think I’m going to stay up here for a couple of minutes before I go back down,” Walter informed him.

Now in a much more solemn, thoughtful frame of mind, Ralph went silently downstairs, finding his mom by the coffee pot. “Hey, Mom?”

Taking a sip of her cinnamon-enhanced coffee, she asked lightly, “Yeah?”

“Do you have a sitter for me for tomorrow during your dentist appointment?”

“No, I was going to ask Sly, though.”

“Could you ask Megan instead? We could stay here at the garage, just like I would’ve with Sly.”

“Megan? Why?” Paige asked in surprise. “I didn’t know you two had become so close.”

They were and they weren’t; Ralph knew that was true, but he liked to consider himself a part of Scorpion… which meant he wanted to help people where he could. And he thought he had an idea of how he could give Megan her ability to create art back to her.

“Please? I… have a project I want to help her on.”

His mom looked dubiously towards where Megan and Sly were still chatting, completely unaware that they were being discussed. “I don’t know, buddy… If the team gets called away on a case, you two will be here alone.”

“I’ve babysat Toby before, and _Megan_ is used to dealing with young geniuses.”

Paige glanced at Walter over the rim of her coffee mug, a smile on her face and in her eyes. Her smile thinned back into a neutral expression as she agreed, “Okay, we’ll try it once, but you’ll have to be _good_ ; I don’t want you tiring her.”

“Thanks, Mom; I won’t.”

Part one of his mission complete, Ralph wandered into the middle of the garage, trying to make a decision. He needed someone to take him to the dollar store.

Sly and Megan didn’t drive, so not them.

Walter would get suspicious. Not him.

His mom would probably ask too many questions, so not her.

So… Happy or Toby…?

Toby, Ralph noted, was staring with glazed eyes at his computer as he played his millionth game of solitaire, and Happy – Happy met his gaze as he looked to her.

Weighing the odds, Ralph decided that she would ask less pointed questions than Toby would. Striding up to her, he declared, “I need supplies for a project; could you take me to the dollar store?”

“The dollar store?” she repeated, raising her eyebrows.

He nodded silently.

“Now?”

“Is that okay? I’m going to need the stuff tomorrow afternoon.”

Happy looked down at a disassembled transmission, the parts of which were spread across her entire desk. She shrugged, deciding, “Yeah, this can wait if it’s that important to you.”

Ralph beamed, “Thanks, Happy.”

“Sure, kid,” she replied, smiling fondly at his exuberance as they headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Paige called after them.

Happy replied for Ralph when he barely slowed down. “Going to the dollar store to get some things for Ralph’s project.”

“What stuff? And for what project? Ralph?”

Hearing the increasing concern in her voice, Ralph answered distractedly, “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow night.”

In reality, if things went according to the plan that he was still mentally polishing, so to speak, she would see it with her own eyes when she got back from her dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon.

After she’d pulled out onto the road, Happy gave him a side-eye, asking pointedly, “Your mom doesn’t even know about this project?”

He gazed pleadingly at her. “Please withhold judgement until _after_ you see what I want to buy?”

She kept giving him that skeptical look, but didn’t say anything about it, so Ralph was content to ride in silence to the store. He spent the time composing a proper shopping list in his head, and as they walked into the store, he asked, “We have both a pedestal fan and a box fan back at the garage, right?”

Happy thought for a second before answering, “Right.”

“And… a bunch of trash bags?”

“…Yes.”

“And a tarp or two?”

“Sure. Between Walter’s projects and mine, we should have all of that. But now I want to know what you think you’re going to do with all of that.”

“You promised you’d wait until after you _saw_ what I was going to buy to—”

“Actually, I verbally agreed to nothing.”

He shot her another imploring look. “ _Please_ , Happy? I don’t know how to explain it without breaking a promise that I _did_ make.”

“Fair enough, kid.” She picked up a basket just inside the entry and asked, “Where are we going in here?”

“The art supplies,” Ralph announced, leading the way.

Happy raised her eyebrows again, but this time she stayed quiet and trailed after him.

…Which meant that Ralph had everything he needed the next afternoon. The moment they got to the garage, an hour before Paige had to leave, Ralph set to work.

By the time his mom left and it was only him and Megan in the garage, his setup was complete and he was ready to go.

“Ralph?” Megan called from the other side of one of the tarps that he had strung up like curtains around a square of concrete space. “Your mom just left; can I come in? She told me you’d said you were working on some sort of project?”

“Of sorts,” he replied cryptically, at first sweeping the tarp aside only enough for him to stick his head out. Then, after once again running through the now-completed check-list he’d constructed in his mind, he pulled the curtain further aside so that Megan could join him in his manmade hideaway.

She looked around at the collection of tarps, fans, paint tin and paint brushes in growing confusion. “I don’t get it,” she admitted, looking back down at him after a moment. “What sort of project is this going to be?”

“It’s more of an art experiment, really.”

“Oh?” Her eyes lit with intrigue. “How’s that?”

 He dipped a paint brush in a tin of orange paint and then lifted it in front of a pedestal fan, letting the wind from the fan blow the excess paint onto the opposite tarp. “It’s… abstract, I suppose, and not at all precise work, but…” and here was the point where he really hoped he wasn’t being too forward. Glancing away and back again, he admitted, “I was hoping to paint with you.”

She gaped at him for a minute, and he could see her trying to put the pieces together in her mind – _how did he know what he knew_ – but wording it the way he had, Ralph didn’t feel he’d betrayed Walter’s trust at all. And Megan apparently didn’t mind whatever conclusion she’d come to either, because she shrugged, beginning to smile widely as she gestured for him to hand her the nearest paintbrush and agreed enthusiastically, “That sounds like a _perfect_ idea, Ralph. Thanks for thinking of me.”

“You’re welcome.” Unsure of what else to say, Ralph held up the paintbrush and a can of paint, and just like that, he was treated to watching another gifted person in their element.


End file.
